The opening eBook of the AI, Automation and Tools category. It explains, in plain language, what AI can and can't do for a small business with one to twenty people, and gives you a working set of habits you can adopt this week without spending much money or learning to code.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 40 minute read
Chapter 3
AI for Research, Planning and Decisions
Using AI for the thinking jobs - background research, customer profiles, planning a campaign, working out a price, weighing options.
Most small business owners spend more time on thinking jobs than they realise. Working out what to charge for a new service. Pulling together a profile of the customer you're aiming at this quarter. Reading a tender document and deciding whether it's worth bidding for. Writing a one-page plan for next month. None of these jobs has a tidy output the way a finished email or a finished invoice does. But they take real time, and they're often the work that gets pushed to evenings and weekends.
AI is unusually good at this kind of thinking work, partly because it's good at reading, summarising, comparing and structuring, and partly because the assistant doesn't get bored. You can ask it to explain something five different ways. You can paste in a long document and ask for the three things you most need to know. You can ask it to argue against your own plan.
This chapter shows you the thinking jobs where AI is most useful, and how to use it without ending up with a plan that sounds like nobody.
The full chapter walks through six concrete thinking jobs - customer profiles, competitor reads, tender summaries, pricing reasoning, campaign planning and decision write-ups - with prompts you can copy into your own assistant.
Customer profiles you can actually use
Customer profile is one of those phrases that sounds either obvious or pretentious depending on who's saying it. The point is simple. You're trying to write down, in one page, who you're really aiming at - so that every later decision about marketing, pricing and service has something concrete to refer back to.
Open your assistant. Tell it about three customers you've actually had recently who fit the kind of work you want more of. Not the worst ones. Not the dream ones. The good, profitable ones who came back. Describe them in plain language - what they do, where they live, why they came to you, what they bought, what they were worried about, what they said afterwards. Then ask: 'Based on these three customers, can you describe the kind of person I should aim my marketing at this quarter? One page, in plain language, no jargon. Include what they're worried about, what they value and what would put them off.'
What you'll get back is rarely perfect. You'll usually disagree with one or two things. Edit it. The point isn't to receive a finished profile. The point is to get a workable draft in fifteen minutes that would have taken you two hours and a sticky-note exercise.
Reading long documents fast
Tenders, partnership agreements, supplier contracts, council planning notices - these are the documents most owners skim and quietly hope they didn't miss anything important in. Paste them into an assistant. Ask: 'Give me a one-page summary of this document, then a list of the five things in it that could cost me money or time, and three questions I should ask before agreeing.'
Treat the answer as a starting point, not a legal opinion. For anything where the cost of getting it wrong is high - a long contract, a planning matter, anything that affects your liability - read the original yourself afterwards or pay a professional. For everything else - tender questions, partnership briefs, supplier comparisons - the AI summary is enough to make a decision.
Pricing reasoning, not pricing answers
The temptation is to ask the assistant what to charge. Don't. It doesn't know your costs, your market or your competitors well enough to give you a real answer, and it will guess. What it can do well is help you think about pricing. Tell it what you currently charge, what your costs are, what you've tried and what's worked or not worked. Then ask it to suggest three different ways of structuring a price for a new service - by hour, by package, by outcome - and the trade-offs of each.
Now you have three options to choose from with the trade-offs already written down. The decision is still yours. The thinking part is faster. For the deeper case on pricing, look back at the Offers and Pricing category.
Six thinking jobs to try this month
Write a one-page customer profile from three real customers
Summarise a tender, brief or contract into a page
Draft three options for pricing a new service
Plan a one-month low-cost marketing push in outline
Write up the case for and against a decision you're stuck on
Turn a meeting transcript into a list of action points and owners
Planning a campaign in outline
If you're planning a marketing push - a seasonal offer, a new service launch, a partnership push - the assistant is a good first sounding board. Tell it the goal in one sentence (twenty new bookings in March, say). Tell it the channels you actually use (email list, Facebook, Google Business Profile, the local paper). Tell it your rough budget. Ask for a four-week outline.
What you'll get back is a generic-looking plan. That's fine. The plan isn't the point. The point is to have a draft you can react to. You'll cross out the bits that don't fit your business, fix the bits that show the assistant doesn't really know your customers and add the bits it missed. Twenty minutes later you have a plan you'd otherwise have written on a quiet Sunday.
Decision write-ups for things you're stuck on
When you're going around in circles on a decision - hire someone or stay solo, drop a service line, raise prices, take on a contract that feels marginal - ask the assistant to write the case for and the case against in plain language. Tell it what you know. Read both versions. The act of reading the argument from the other side is often what unlocks the decision. The answer is still yours.
What to do this week
Pick one of the six thinking jobs in the box above. The one you've been putting off. Spend half an hour with the assistant on it. The aim is a workable draft you can use, not a polished document. Notice how much more thinking you do with a draft in front of you than you do staring at a blank page.
Recurring principle for this chapter: use AI and tools to support judgment, not replace it. For the deeper view of how decisions about offers and pricing are made, look back at the Offers and Pricing category. For the next step on writing the actual marketing content, look ahead to chapter four.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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